mawise

I've been using .lan, referenced in rfc6762[1] as a good alternative to the multicast .local

We do not recommend use of unregistered top-level domains at all, but should network operators decide to do this, the following top-level domains have been used on private internal networks without the problems caused by trying to reuse ".local." for this purpose:

      .intranet.
      .internal.
      .private.
      .corp.
      .home.
      .lan.

I turned up the following in my searching:

https://cncnet.org/red-alert-2

https://github.com/OpenRA/ra2

Sharing my experience as a tinkerer, sideloader, and recent Kobo owner.

I used a Kindle for ages, always in airplane mode and only sideloading content. Honestly, it was a pretty good setup.[1] But it seemed like it would be harder to setup this way on newer devices, so when mine finally failed, I got a Kobo Clara BW. I was thrilled I could boot it up in "sideloader mode" and not even register it or enable wifi.

I noticed poor typography on my epubs, learned about converting to kepub so I did that (which helped). It was a familiar flow to what I was used to converting to azw3 for the Kindle. My remaining typography gripe with kepubs is that it treats a word+em-dash as a word for inserting space in full justification. Em-dashes generally don't have spaces on either side, this often looks like a space has been inserted only to the right of the em-dash.

I went down the rabbit hole of NickelMenu and other readers including KOReader and Plato, and even tried (and mostly failed) to vibecode my own opds client app. (because KOReader which has one built-in felt overwhelming)

My current sense is the device feels so much more like it is mine. I have much more flexibility to tinker with it. It is not as polished as the Kindle and the Adobe rendering feels stupid, but that's also a sharp edge that only the side-loading community will hit, most of whom use Calibre which can auto convert to kepub for them. Everyone else is buying books from the Kobo store and getting them delivered as kepubs.

So in the end, I'm a big fan of the Kobo devices.

[1]: Except you cannot remove a wifi password if you aren't in range of that wifi signal. I had a rude experience when my two-year-old was fiddling with my Kindle at my in-laws' house and turned on the wifi where there was still a saved credential. An update triggered immediately and I was frustrated for days that everything in the UI changed.

Referenced but not detailed in the article: under android settings -> Apps -> AI Core, you can disable the app and clear the stored data.

Human trial in 2025 looks promising?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41160460/#:~:text=ResultsAt%...

I consider myself pretty pro-privacy, but there is so much dragnet surveillance and legitimate breaches of the fourth amendment that I have a hard time getting up in arms over a company complying with a valid search warrant that is scoped to three hard drives (and which required law enforcement to have physical possession of the drives to begin with).

This is so much more reasonable than (for example) all the EU chat control efforts that would let law enforcement ctrl+f on any so-called private message in the EU.

The article goes back and forth between bloggers who "are doing well" (ie: making money) and efforts that are non-commercial. It comes across as asking humanity to put more effort into writing and publishing in a non-profitable space while the blogging incentives are profit. I still think the unexplored space for blogging (and the LLM-proof space) is _private_ blogging--for friends and family. But maybe Facebook killed that space off, who knows.

Also worth reading, the IndieWeb's "Social Reader"[1] concept. Built more on websites/blogs as the foundational units.

[1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader

Um, I'm building this? [1]

The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.

I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.

Herman- I'll reach out to you by email!

[1] https://havenweb.org

I met a guy a while ago who's passion was enabling self-hosting. His vision was to use an old android phone as a server--he ended up building a domain registrar[1] to facilitate OAuth-style flows for configuring DNS and an ngrok-style proxy[2] service that could configure DNS through said flow.

[1] https://takingnames.io/ [2]: https://boringproxy.io/

Commentary by Cal Newport: https://calnewport.com/an-important-new-study-on-phones-and-...

(open source) Self-hostable, private social media alternative (like Facebook circa 2012). Functionally it is a private blog that speaks RSS with a built-in RSS aggregator. Self-hosting being the only way to actually have privacy in a social-media-type space.

https://github.com/havenweb/haven

Yeah, I don't really grok the focus on MF2 given the wide adoption of RSS/Atom, but the social reader concept isn't one I've seen anyone else advocating for. It also suffers from the same spam problem of anything else that allows public submission of content. I've been exploring it more in the context of _private_ blogging were you already have a layer of access control.

I have opinions[1] on Webmentions. It sounds like such a great approach, but it also opens up the original author to hosting mountains of spam and other low-quality comments, and moderation is a lot of work. Arguably, we see the same problem today on sites that let you post comments.

[1] https://havenweb.org/2023/04/10/private-comments.html

There is a lot of interesting work in this space by the IndieWeb community. They've got a vision of (and lots of a spec for) a social reader[1] that uses RSS for lots of the things people got in the habit of with Web2 social media (comment, repost, etc)

[1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader

Is there a Github API for creating issues? I also maintain a free, open-source app and would love to make it easy for a crash to give users a button that opens a Github issues form--allowing users to see what crash data is populated and submit it if they want.

Oh cool, it's like RSS consumption for video content (I think). I worry that since it isn't using blessed APIs it would get shut down by the platforms if it gets much traction. Also "trust me instead of them" can be a tough sell to the privacy-focused crowd. I'd love something that makes it trivial effort for the creators to directly publish on more open platforms--more like RSS publishing for video content. But youtube gives you discovery and a cut in the ad revenue, so I'm not sure how to get the incentives to align...

It's funny; as I've been working on Haven[1], one of my guiding lights is what Facebook _could have been_[2]. To that end the opening section is really inspiring. This is describing a world where digital tools enhance your friendships. I think that's still possible and still a worthwhile goal--I just don't think it can be done by an entity with a corporate incentive structure. Those incentives will always tend towards enshittification[3].

[1] https://havenweb.org

[2] https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#

It's worse than that. _Tree_ isn't even a well-defined thing.

Trees are not a monophyletic taxonomic group but consist of a wide variety of plant species that have independently evolved a trunk and branches as a way to tower above other plants to compete for sunlight.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree

It's important to remember that these upscalers will hallucinate new content. Especially when law enforcement tries to use these to find suspects from blurry photos. See this example from the lower left of their front-page demo where it adds a person to the boat: https://imgur.com/a/Vo3zlO3

I made an RSS feed of these front-page images a while ago if anyone wants to use them:

https://nytonline.net/rss

I've got to chime in here, because of how much this overlaps with the project I've been working on called Haven[1].

A lot of these problems go away with a decentralized/open-source private model. If your posts aren't public then there is no spam. If everyone runs their own node of open-source (or better yet: open-protocol, ie RSS) software, then there is no centralized entity able to have incentives of profiting off the platform.

Information propagation speed is a good call-out as dangerous. Even with all the spam/shilling/trills removed, it still leads to the girl who's having a great time on her snowboarding trip until she posts pictures on Instagram and drops into a foul mood because not enough people immediately liked her posts.

I'd love to connect and share thoughts, feel free to reach out[2]/

[1] https://github.com/havenweb/haven

[2] https://havenweb.org/contact.html

I've been working on Haven[1] as an open-source self-hostable alternative to give control back to people. I actually wrote a blog post about how the move from "see what your friends/family are doing" to "just keep scrolling" was a pretty blatant bait-and-switch[2]. I think any alternative will fail in the same ways as Facebook has unless there are different incentives. I'm hoping that by making Haven open source and decentralized there won't be a path for me to make money off of it (beyond maybe hosting fees?) if it gets broader adoption.

[1] https://havenweb.org

[2] https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html

Good call, I've added an MIT license to the project.

Most ebooks have embedded cover images that Calibre will automatically extract. I know of https://isbndb.com/ which has covers of some resolution but I've never tried using them before.

Right now books are sorted by author name (eek, I think first name--calibre has an author_sort field I should use), then series name, then series index.

For more on zoning challenges, I'd suggest the book Arbirary Lines[1] by M. Nolan Grey; excellent overview of the history and problems.

[1] https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines#desc

This looks awesome! For written Portuguese, how different is Brazillian vs European? I've been trying to learn European Portuguese and it is challenging to find resources that differentiate between the two.

I ran into this building search for a family tree project. I found out that Rails provides `ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate()` which I could use for normalization.

What about a cross between IPFS/Nostr and RSS? RSS (or atom) already provides a widely-adopted syndication structure. All that's missing are signatures so that a middleman can re-broadcast the same content. Maybe with signatures that's really reinventing SSB[1]. But if we think of the network in a more social sense, where you're connecting to trusted peers (think: irl friends), maybe the signatures aren't even that important. All that's left then is to separate the identifier for the feed from the location--today those are both URL--so you can fetch a feed from a non-authoritative peer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt